


Eltaam

by ChrisBranNorling



Series: Guild Wars 2 Stories [19]
Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Blind Character, Cisgender Character, Gen, Nonbinary Character, amputee character, child character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2018-10-30 10:07:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10874553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChrisBranNorling/pseuds/ChrisBranNorling
Summary: Discovering someone long forgotten.1328 AE





	Eltaam

Rancalagen holds a near toy-like golem in his hand, thumb scraping over the deactivated energy plate. So different from the standard sensory matrices he was used to.

Shaking his head, he traces a pattern on the energy plate, and the golemite boots up. While the lab didn’t offer anything of use in the grand scheme of things, it had a plethora of research and plans pertaining to golems and their uses, all of them still relevant despite their age.

“It’s cute.” Drephan twists their upper body around as much as they can within the leystone they’re encased in, and leans their head over Rancalagen’s shoulder to get a better look at the golemite.

Not really comprehending, Rancalagen tosses it up in the air a few times, it’s small arms flailing as it attempts to gain some sort of balance. “’re all small thin’s cute to ya?” As soon as the sentence comes out, the sharp edges of his teeth slot together easily as his jaw tenses.

The only sound for a minute is the golemite flailing in Rancalagen’s increasingly strong grip.

“Perhaps,” Drephan murmurs, turning back, and even shifting a few inches away. Moving to stand, Rancalagen doesn’t get far when Drephan reaches back with their shorter arm and grasps his wrist.

“Ran … I know I’ve made mistakes. I never looked properly, because despite my sadness, I seemed content to let things stay as they were for a long time. I’ve pushed you far too much and I still keep saying things that make you close yourself off.” Oddly fused and disjointed fingers covered in warm stone grip tighter. “If this … if I am too much, you don’t have to stay.” Each word seems forced out, but the hand encircling Rancalagen’s wrist unwraps.

Taking his chance, he gets up and walks out. Feeling so cold, despite the burning lump in his chest, Rancalagen lifts up his goggles as he punches in the destination to the Command Centre. His eyes feel like they’re burning too, too much like . . . . A fist slams down on the console’s face, the holographic symbols flicker, then shift. He passes through the gate just as it boots up.

Rancalagen’s brows pinch together as the hum of the active gate cuts off, a security measure? Because this definitely is not the Command Centre. Pulling his goggles back down, he squints into the darkness. In the distance, a faint glow of blue lines the walls, not enough to light anything, but it’s something to work towards.

His attention is called down to the golemite still in his hand, it flails even more as it gets tossed into the air again, this time landing on it’s front as he opens the back panel by memory alone. A tap here, a switch there, send a charge through the cables, and the panel sinks closed again. White light erupts from the numerous panels on the golemite’s body. The harshness strikes Rancalagen square in the face. Squinting through it until his eyes adjust, a long hall stretches outward with no console in sight and that faint blue eliminated.

Footsteps echo with not much to disrupt them as he passes the light back and forth across the hall. Finally Rancalagen comes upon a pile of rubble largely blocking the way. He angles the golemite back towards the inactive gate and hunkers down to peer through one of the lower spaces between the angular stones. Sure enough, he can see the blue glow pulsing faintly from somewhere behind the cobbled together wall.

Passed the wall, there’s the sound of scattering stones, and a dull thump. Rancalagen’s brow furrows behind his goggles, and presses them against the gap he’s spying through, as if that would make things clearer beyond the crack.

Things are quiet for a moment, then there’s a very living sound, a sob, choked off a second after it gets let out, but having existed all the same.

“’Lo?” Rancalagen chances to break the ensuing silence, his voice muffled by the stone, but he thinks his ears pick up a hitch of a breath. “Ya stuck in there?”

A few more beats of silence before there’s a faint “B-Bladdi?”

The name that was called gives Rancalagen enough pause not to respond. It’s familiar. He knows he’s heard it recently, but can’t place exactly where he had encountered it.

There’s shuffling, then another closer, stronger call of that name.

“’Re ya okay?” Rancalagen passes off his confusion to focus on the matter at hand. “S’a cave-in ‘ere an’ I can’ ge’ to ya easy.”

A sharp breath right on the other side of the makeshift wall makes Rancalagen twitch. There’s soft patting against the other side of the stone, before another sob. The hitching of small breaths coming too quickly one after another.

“M’righ’ on th’ other side o’th’ wall, s’okay.”

The breaths get marginally steadier, but there’s a wobble in their small voice. “It hurts, Bladdi.” It cracks from some type of strain, and Rancalagen’s ears pick up light sniffling.

“S’okay,” he repeats before standing up and stepping back. The wall of interlocking stone is daunting, but when he looks at it in separate parts, it’s manageable. He kneels back down by the gap. When he fits the face of his goggles to it, he isn’t able to see the blue glow, something’s blocking the way. “I need ya to ge’ back while I work on th’ wall. It can collapse f’I do somethin’ wrong.”

A little mumbling that Rancalagen can’t properly discern, but he can hear movement as they shuffle away from the wall and he gets back up to look at where he should start.

It’s slow going, constructing a path up and over while at the same time making sure it doesn’t fully collapse, but Rancalagen manages, eventually. At the very least a few hours after he’d started, he tucks the golemite into his belt and sets about scaling what he’d built.

Some of the stones shift as he puts his weight on them, but for the most part it holds. Breaking over the top, Rancalagen takes out the golemite again and lets its light shine down. The beam catches stone, stone, and more stone, until it casts itself across a more organic shape huddled against the wall.

They’re the size of a progeny and covered in a full body suit, but the head piece and the right arm carries extensive damage. Rancalagen does his best to slide down to the floor and walks over. The light revealing golden curls poking out of the head piece, and pockmarked grey-brown skin. Rancalagen runs a claw over his left cheek, feeling the minute dips of similar pockmarks but made by Drephan’s ley energy output.

“Yo, kid.” He taps the progeny’s side as lightly as he can, but the action prompts a full body jerk away from him. The presumably soft body strikes the wall hard, and he lets out a groan. Milky blue eyes blink open but don’t focus on him and instead gaze off behind him.

“Bladdi?” Is all he says, voice as shaky as his arms try to push his weight up. The left does just fine, but when he puts his right hand against the ground, his wrist bends into an awkwardly right angle.

“S’no’ m’name. M’Rancalagen.” He reaches out to help the progeny, hands fully encompassing his shoulders and then some. He can feel bones easily through the strangely textured suit. “How old’re ya?“

“S-six and a half.” Is said through a great sniff, but the end lilts up in some semblance of a question.

“N’yer name?” Rancalagen lets him lean back against he wall.

“Eltaam.”

“Good, Eltaam.” Rancalagen sits down in front of him, eyes focused on Eltaam’s hazy ones. Something caused those strange cataracts. “Wha’s th’ last thin’ ya remember?”

Eltaam sniffs again, his right hand coming up to do something with his face, but the hand itself sways limp in the air, held down by gravity, as if it were completely detached from the arm itself. It bumps into the encompassing helmet, shifting until the stub of Eltaam’s arm is probably pressed against the odd material. “T-the alarms were sounding. My-” his breath hitches again “-my mom and dad, they came and got me from K-Kedd and Flomm’s.”

In Eltaam’s ensuing silence, the name Flomm ticks the right memory in Rancalagen’s head. Flomm was Zrikk’s mom . . . and Bladdi was Zrikk’s sister. He’d spent most of his life thus far with so little knowledge of his father, then ‘this Rata Novus,’ as Zrikk’s last few notes at phrased the city, happened. Now Rancalagen hardly believes in a silly thing like fate, the Eternal Alchemy is far too mutable for something like that, but the recent sequence of events were a bit too interconnected to be much of anything else.

“Ttttthey never c-come to see me,” the hitches in Eltaam’s breath finally become accompanied by tears. The progeny attempts to wipe them away, but the helmet stops them, prompting more tears.

“M’gonna try an’ take tha’ off,” Rancalagen murmurs, touching Eltaam’s shoulders again before going up to see what he can do with it. He has to lean over the progeny, but there’s a few straps buckled tight on the back. He picks them apart with his claws, and gently lifts the helmet off Eltaam’s head.

Large ears spill out, but don’t droop down like Rancalagen is used to seeing, instead they go outwards, tapering farther away from Elam’s overlarge head. Next is a mass of dusky clumps of hair, one of the greatest tells on the progeny that time has passed.

Tears are still streaming down Eltaam’s pudgy cheeks by the time Rancalagen sets the helmet down on the ground beside them.

“T-ttttthank you,” the progeny chokes out, wiping the water away as best as he can, but mostly just smearing it over his face.

“Wha’appened after they go’ ya?” Rancalagen prompts.

Taking in a couple large breaths, Eltaam curls into himself. “Took me to their lab. Stuffed me in this suit, then into a weird tube.” He says, muffled into his knees. “I woke up and it was all dark. It’s still dark. Why can’t I see anything, B-Bladdi?”

“Rancalagen,” he says again, but puts no force into it as he presses his hand to the top of Eltaam’s head. Eye damage, and extensive too, from what he was able to see. Something decides to sit in his chest when he feels the progeny shift up into his palm and shake his head back and forth. He moves his hand along with Eltaam’s motions and considers his options.

Well, they weren’t really options. He isn’t going to leave the kid here, so that only leaves him with working on getting the both of them back to the Class Five labs.

Rancalagen tugs out the golemite and faces its shining energy plate down the tunnel. Unlike behind him, the light strikes multiple objects, making them stand in relief against the geometric stone. A line of four large tubes half buried in the ground, all in some state of disrepair. Somehow, those things must have been able to put someone in suspended stasis for … over a hundred years. He looks back down to Eltaam, who has largely uncurled in an effort to get more contact from Rancalagen’s hand.

“Can I pick ya up?”

“Yes yes, please.” Eltaam reaches his hands up, making aborted grabbing motions.

Doing just that, Rancalagen fixes his damaged eyes onto a console a few steps from the tubes and makes for that. Nestling the progeny in the crook of his left arm, he shines the golemite’s plate over the stone face. The intractable holographic surface flickers, garbled and distorted symbols flit randomly across it until Rancalagen sets the golemite down and presses down a specific symbol with his finger.

Over and over, he pins and shifts what he can, making some semblance of what he can assume was the original intention of the holoscreen. Four rectangles housing a single flat line flicker up in one of the corners. Rancalagen only pays them a glance before scrolling through the options, finally coming upon something mentioning a gate.

It is only a log of recent events, but it lists the lab’s gate code, and Rancalagen can only hope there is a gate console back down the tunnel that he had overlooked.

“Gonna ‘ave ta climb a bi’.” He murmurs to the progeny, tucking the golemite into his belt again, but angling it so the energy plate faces forwards so he can see and starts stumbling up the rcollection of rocks as best he can.

Minutes later he slides down the other side, making for the gate he had arrived through. The golemite sheds enough light for Rancalagen to spy a console a ways off and jogs up to it. Half of it is broken by fallen debris, but luckily enough, it boots up just fine after he shifts around some of the controls.

He’s able to input the source gate code, as well as the destination, and the gate hums to life.

“Gotta go through a gate,” something in Rancalagen’s chest sort of clenches, when Eltaam grips at his ratty old uniform with the only hand he has left. But instead of dwelling on it, he strides purposefully through, and hopefully back to Drephan.


End file.
